Fuck, Rogers foobarded my hosting account so I don't have access to the comparisons until Monday sorry.. but here's a list of reasons why I picked up my camera. I wrote it for someone else who enquired about it.
Pros:
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* It doesn't need drivers to connect it to the PC for capturing/editing through a firewire cable. I've fooled around with more than a few consumer level & pro level cameras, and as far as connectivity goes.. this one blew me away. Within 10 seconds of connecting it, I loaded up my editing program and captured what I just shot. The still camera element connects & transfers through USB and needs a small driver install. The reason this is a big deal is because most consumer level cameras come with proprietary software which require you to have installed before you can do anything with the camera through computer. Sony does that allot and because their programming department sucks their software is useless, making editing with their cameras a pain in the friggen ass. For software, I use Vegas Pro 4.0.
* Image quality is superb. As I mentioned, I work for a company that does video/audio production, and we have a few top pro-Mini-DV cameras here. And I did a side by side test. The Optura 20 blew away our Canon XL-1 in terms of sharpness & contrast. The XL-1 had slightly more colour saturation, but lacked the detail of the optura 20. Again, the XL-1 is a pro-level camera so this was astounding.
This is the XL-1 camera I put it up against.
*Not to big & not to small. The problem some people run into with cameras is they get them too small.. this results in allot of shakiness. The Optura 20 is a perfect 'in-between' size, and allows for steadier shots. Although most cameras include an image stabilizer (including the Optura 20) the smaller you camera is, the more shaky shots will turn out. My dad has this tiny sony cam and by watching the footage from it, you'd think the shooter had parkinson's.
*Mechanical control. Of course it has an automatic setting, but you can also adjust the focus manually, shutter speed manually, exposure manually and a whole range of other settings, including a super night mode where a bright built-in LED light illuminates a dark room enough for a slow shutter shot. As a bonus, you can also add aftermarket lenses onto the camera from wide angle to UV to polarizing lenses. It also has a 16x optical zoom, which is excellent.
* MiniDV is the cassette format it uses. This is the only consumer-level format that's also used in the pro world, for a few reasons. The tapes are cheap. They are digital. They are broadcast resolution. They record in DV-AVI -a digital video file format that's easy to capture & edit with.
Cons:
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*I wouldn't mind if the still camera part of it was slightly higher resolution, but it's fine with me. I mean it's no Nikon F70 but it can take stills that print out 6x4's fine at this rez.
*shutter speed gets fairly slow during low light conditions, but still keeps the image flowing fine.
*the tape is bottom loading, slightly a pain to reload a tape if it's mounted on a tripod, as you gotta take it off, then remove the shoe then eject the tape.
*The LCD view screen is big, but the resolution of the LCD view screen is slightly less than it's counterpart's, it's totally fine though cuz it'd not like it effects image quality.
